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28th February 2024
01:23pm GMT
Peter Ellenstein, 62, was a man who had accepted that he likely would never have any children of his own.
However, when a woman named Rachel contacted him online in 2017 claiming to be his biological daughter, he would soon realise that was about to change.
“Hi Peter. I am messaging you under very strange circumstances," Rachel wrote in the Facebook message.
“This is a very sensitive subject... but to give you a bit of my background, I was born in 1994 due to in-vitro fertilisation. The reason I am messaging you is that I believe you may have been the donor.”
This would be the start of a huge revelation for Peter, who would come to learn that his means of raising money decades prior had huge consequences.
In the 1980s and 90s, he was a sperm donor to raise money to start a theatre company in the United States.
Peter, after making his deposits at his local sperm bank, carried on with his life none the wiser until that fateful day in 2017 when Rachel messaged him.
Similar to the plot of Delivery Man, where Vince Vaughn plays a delivery man named David who returns from work to find a lawyer representing a sperm bank where he gave 693 donations and earned a sum of $24,255 during his student years.
In the film, the lawyer tells him that the clinic gave his samples to women in the clinic and that he has fathered 533 children.
“I was so shocked it was like a bolt from the blue - I held it out for a friend to read, who couldn’t believe it either. I messaged my then wife and siblings about it, who wondered if it could be a scam," Peter told The Sun.
“But it wasn’t. I messaged Rachel back and we arranged to meet later that night, and it was amazing.
"We hugged each other and cried, but we hit it off instantly and ending up talking until the early hours of the morning."
With his daughter's help, they were able to locate more children born from Peter's donations, a list which seemed to get longer and longer, recently reaching 37 offspring.
“I met up three weeks later with Rachel again, and she had a list of another 11 children that she had found," he told the outlet.
“Then I went on a genealogy site and I was finding another one each month and began reaching out to them.”
The new father has since met with 34 of the 37 children his sperm was used to create and says meeting them is the best thing that has ever happened to him.
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